Chapter 1

The famous philosopher Ethan Benedict theorized that time was a never-ending loop set to spin without ceasing, a wheel the goddess never stopped turning. Souls, he said, are eternal, doomed to repeat their existence on Time's wheel over and over again.

For better or worse, Benedict was only partially correct. Time is a line, not a circle, a path with a beginning but no end and an infinite number of branches. Our world and worlds like ours exist along a shared path, endlessly creating new routes with our choices. Only a few will ever master the art of moving between them.

-Hecate's Guide to Arcane Philosophy

Rorick

T he old firehouse was the last man-made barrier between the historic district of Purgatory and the old growth forest of the wilds beyond. I hesitated before trying the doorknob, peeking inside the frosted glass front instead. It was dimly lit, and I couldn't see my partner. I shoved a hand down the lapel of my frock coat and pulled out the note she'd sent me, delivered that evening by a handful of little magical butterflies.

For reassurance, I read the note again under a dark-purple night sky on an empty cobblestone street.

Rorick,

For the last time, I'm not avoiding working with you. In addition to the load I carry at my laboratory, I've been assisting at the Home for Foundlings three times a week. If I don't, I worry all that needs doing there will pile onto Prim's shoulders alone. She's much too kind to think of herself when it comes to helping those less fortunate, and I don't wish to see her buried. You may visit me this evening. We can't have you walking about hungry, so of course I'll make time for you. As much as I can spare.

-Quiet

Though she insisted I was invited, all of my previous visits had ended in a shouting match triggered by that bloody circus and the ominous invitation sent to us by the specters who haunted it. Our last argument had erupted into an epic row that made me now doubt my welcome. I pictured myself trying to open the door to Quiet's remodeled laboratory and finding it blocked by the wards she kept at the entrance, turning me away because I'd irritated her for the very last time.

Admittedly, the name calling had been a little unnecessary. Even if she'd started it. The notion of having things unresolved between us put a prickling sensation under my skin, an itch that went too deep to scratch.

She wouldn't invite me just to lock me out, surely? Partners argued. Even lovers had disagreements, didn't they?

And yet the irritating itch persisted. I shifted uncomfortably.

Collecting myself, I tucked her note away and squared up to the offensive door. I grabbed the knob in one gloved hand. The knob turned, denting when I squeezed it too hard by accident. I sighed as it clicked and swung open. This was a good sign.

As I held my breath, my boots glided easily over the threshold, and immediately I felt silly for doubting her. Complicated witch wards built of salt lines and dead man's blood were embedded in a web formation in the earthen floors, carved out between rows of fragrant flowers. A large beehive droned in the far corner under a dim lantern.

Quiet did in fact still want me inside her home. But she had been avoiding me despite what she said in her note. Her excuses had grown increasingly thin of late. A whole week had passed since we last shared a room. I'd even tried tempting her with a case I knew would pique her interest, a clever bank heist a shapeshifting ichor had pulled off, and still she sent excuses. Even now she was only letting me stop in for a bite.

Well, I'd get more than a meal out of this visit, so help me.

A path of flagstones led through moth-ridden flowerbeds to a second door, a round metal one with a wheel for a handle, like the sort you'd find on a ship. With a grinding turn of the wheel and a clank, the door opened. Braided garlic hanging from a low ceiling brushed over me as I pushed inside.

And there was Quiet, busy at the small desk in a cozy sitting room, surrounded by glittering lightning beetles. She put a charcoal pencil to paper in her journal, writing furiously. Her black hair fell down her back in a thick braid. Midnight blue skirts hid her long legs. Her witch hat sat on the desk by her elbow.

Anita, a spider assistant, dropped from the ceiling to greet me. I used a finger to tickle the tuft of hair that stood out on her back before moving farther into the sitting room.

"I'll be right with you," Quiet said, finally acknowledging me, her voice strained.

I felt like a customer rather than her partner, like someone who'd strolled in off the street in need of a witch's brew or some other academic solution. But I didn't need a problem solved with her arcane entomology or with tests and experiments and equations.

I just needed her.

"There." She lowered her pencil at last.

Her gray eyes met mine, and her cheeks immediately colored in that charming way of hers. A crackle of tension zipped between us, want and aggravation brewing into a slow building storm. That pesky prickle under my skin intensified.

"You're late," she noted dryly.

"The Night Train was late," I said, removing my bowler hat and gloves. I discarded them on the end table by the armchair with too many mauve cushions, making it clear that I planned to stay a while.

She chewed her cheek a moment. "If you're hungry—"

"I'm always hungry for you," I said, and her flush darkened to an even more attractive shade. "But I'd like to clear the air first." I removed my frock coat next, dropping it over the arm of the chair. Then I made a comb with my fingers, brushing dark hair out of my eyes so I could better watch her glaring at me.

Her jaw flexed. "I've already told you, Rorick, I'm not avoiding you. I've just been—"

"You're avoiding me." My nostrils flared, the scent of hot soup and garlic strong in my nose. I could hear her dinner burbling in a pot in the back room.

She rolled her eyes. "What I'm avoiding is another argument. This battle between us will have no winner. We both know it."

"As I'm the one you insist on fighting with, the outcome is the same and intolerable to me," I grumped.

Quiet rose to her feet in a huff, scrambling in the direction of her makeshift kitchen. I dogged her heels. She couldn't get away from me that easily.

"We have a case that needs working, an important one, but you refuse to see reason." Her steps were brisk.

I matched her pace. "We can't be hired by bloody spirits, or whatever the devil they are. That's ridiculous and you know it. They couldn't even pay us for our troubles."

I'd said it before. I'd say it again and again if I had to. The clowns at the Castleway Circus could invite us inside until time as we knew it ended, and I would continue to ignore them. Because of those specters' silly games, my partner had gotten swallowed whole by a massive coffin-dweller. A slight Quiet was much too quick to dismiss.

Well, I wouldn't be dismissing it. Not ever. Those specters could fuck right off.

She shot me a heated look over her shoulder. "I know what you're thinking. It's written all over your face again."

"Don't," I warned because I could read her just as clearly as she could me. This wasn't going to end well.

"The specters weren't trying to feed me to that monster with their trial," she said, ignoring my warning. "They were trying to help us. They gave me what I asked for, didn't they? We escaped because of their assistance. They don't want to harm me. What good would I even be to them dead?" Quiet crossed to the bubbling pot on the stove. She lifted the lid and stirred the steaming contents inside with a wooden spoon.

The spices were sharp in my nose, a pleasing though overwhelming savory flavor. "I don't want harm to come to children any more than you do," I said, but she wasn't looking at me, wasn't listening. We'd already had this conversation, and she was as fed up with it as I was.

I snatched her spoon out of her hand, splattering broth about the rim of the pot.

Her storm cloud eyes snapped to mine. "Give that back, Rorick."

"Not until you hear me on this."

"I won't go inside the circus, not without you, but I won't stop investigating. I won't ignore the clowns when they show up here. I won't cover my mirrors or hide from any trials they send my way. That's all the ‘hearing' you'll be getting from me on the matter." Her hand dipped in the pocket of her skirts, and her wand emerged a heartbeat later, bladed end aimed at my chin.

My lips twitched. "Are you going to stab me with that?"

"No," she said through her teeth, "but if any part of my dinner burns onto the bottom of this pot, I'm going to shrink you to the size of my thumb and boil you in my stew."

My returning smile was compulsive. I handed the spoon back to her. She stirred her meal gruffly, using her wand to snuff out the blue magical fire in the burner. In silence, she stowed away the dagger-wand and the spoon, then she transferred her meal to a ceramic bowl. The bowl was too hot for her to carry. I made good use of my tougher skin, toting it back into the sitting room for her, blowing the steam off intermittently.

I set her dinner on her desk. She eyed it apprehensively from the other side of the room. Then she stared at me the same way she stared at math equations that needed solving on her boards upstairs, sucking on the inside of her cheek. As the silence thickened around us, my dead heart squeezed in my chest sluggishly.

"I just don't want to lose you," I confessed, fingers flexing at my sides. I was unsure what to do with my hands.

Her darks brows ticked up briefly. She worked her throat. "I know what worries you. You think I don't understand, but I do," she said, gentling her tone.

I hated the distance between us—the literal and the metaphorical—and I scowled at the carpet. "We thought we'd gotten ourselves caught in that castle by accident. I blamed the werewolf, same as you, for getting us trapped inside. But we know better now, don't we?"

She nodded once, briskly. "We have our suspicions."

"Not suspicions. Those were my consequences growing in that castle. My choices trying to hurt us. My crimes trapped us there!"

"Rorick—"

"I murdered them, murdered my own blood and did Fate knows what else. I still can't remember much, even with all the healing potions you've had Prim mix for me."

Her hands made fists at her sides. "Rorick, you're not a monster," she said sternly. "Not like they were."

"Maybe not just like them but close enough. I am a murderer."

"You didn't experiment on other vampires." Her fingers knotted in her skirts, and her gray eyes went glassy. "You didn't hurt children. What you did was arguably in self-defense, and—"

"And when my consequences locked us inside and repeatedly tried to murder us," I pressed on, drowning her out, "when I put my hand through those holes in the wall during that ghostly trial, same as you, the creature didn't take me. No, I wasn't enough to pay for all that I'd done. To punish me, my consequences tried to take you as payment," I said, voice breaking. The words I'd been turning over and over in my mind nightly since I'd learned the truth of it all spilled out. I couldn't hold them in even if I wanted to, so determined was I to make her hear me.

Because I was not who I'd thought I was. I was the Duke of the Damned. The first vampire. And I'd put the woman I love in grave danger, a danger I felt clawing at my instincts, stalking me.

Haunting me.

"But you faced it," she said. "You faced your eternal consequences and you won. The coffin-dweller is dead. You saw the darkness dry up into ash, same as I did!"

I sent her a small, sad smile. "You and I both know it's not done. We don't know how much or for how long that darkness was leaking into the circus through the aqueducts."

Her lips pressed together hard enough to make them go pale. "And you know what happens when consequences go ignored too long. We can't keep avoiding them."

"They're not yours to avoid," I said through my teeth.

She stomped toward me then. "I don't want to lose you either, you clod! You great stubborn—"

"Name calling again?" I groaned.

"—bull-headed, cantankerous—"

"No one, and I mean no one , is more bull-headed than you, Quiet," I scoffed, coming up to meet her step for step. "And I'm not the one trying to run us into danger. I'm the one advocating we stay the fuck away from that horrid place! You're the one who won't stop sniffing around it!"

"For you !" she shouted in my face. "To save you, you—"

My lips came crashing against hers. She was nearly as tall as I was, and we came together in an angry tangle, reaching desperately, clawing at fabric. I dug my fingers into her waist. I couldn't hold enough of her, try as I might. Leaning back, I squeezed her so tight to my chest I lifted her off the ground. Her feet pedaled gently, boots skimming the tops of mine.

It was a bruising kiss. A no-one-is-allowed-to-hurt-you-but-me kiss. When I sat her back down on her feet, her breath blew warm and sweet against my face. Her lips were parted just slightly, and her eyes remained closed.

It was the first time a kiss from Quiet left a feeling of melancholy deep in my heart in its wake.

Still, I clung to her as firmly as she held on to me. I was trapped there with her. Trapped all over again like we'd been in Eckert Castle. I wanted to protect her just as much as she wanted to protect me, and neither of us were backing down. The impasse between us was insurmountable.

Releasing me, she rubbed fingers along the worried creases forming in her brow, and her eyes opened.

"We could . . . call a truce for the night," I offered, sadness seeping into my voice.

Her gaze flittered between me and the steaming bowl on the desk. "I would like that. I've . . . I've missed you."

The confession warmed through my chest and stomach. "I've never been far, you know."

"I know," she said with a sigh, and she leaned into me, allowing my weight to brace hers. "Believe it or not, I don't enjoy being mean to you."

"Yes, you do."

A breathy laugh shook her shoulders. "All right," she relented, "maybe I like being mean to you a little. Sometimes. But I haven't enjoyed it lately." Stubborn wisps of ebony hair broke out from her braid to frame her face.

I caught the strands near her ear, rubbing them gently between my fingers. "I've missed you, too."

Stepping back, she wrung her hands, suddenly shy. "While my food cools, would you . . . like to have your meal?"

Lips quirking over her bashfulness, I shook my head. "I don't need one tonight."

I wasn't interested in an obligatory bite, not when her kisses made me sad and too much still hung unresolved between us. My preference was that she begged me for it, lost in passion, but that was unlikely to happen any time soon. Even with a temporary truce called, we remained at a stalemate. Though her blood would always be appealing—her scent of citrus and wildflowers and crushed herbs as alluring as ever—I'd rather hold off longer, give us more time to figure things out. My next meal would be even more satisfying then.

Her brow furrowed. "But aren't you thirsty?"

I shrugged. "I didn't come here for that. I came here to wear you down," I said with a grin.

She rolled her eyes at me, but there was no heat in it. "I plan to meet with Goose and Astor in the morning, so I can't stay up very late," she said. Then she laid a hand on my shoulder, tracing the stitching there at the top of my waistcoat.

"Do you wish you could, though?" I asked, matching her gentler volume. I'd never ask her to give up the sun for me permanently. I knew how much she loved it.

She nodded hesitantly, a reminder that these vulnerable moments were as new for her as they were for me.

"That's all I needed to know," I told her. "I don't mind tucking you into bed early, but I'd still like to stay if you'll have me. I won't interfere with your schedule, but let me lie beside you for a while."

She frowned at the seam of my shirt. "And you're sure you're not thirsty?"

"Not very."

Her nose wrinkled. "You won't have to bite anyone else in the meantime? If I'm not promptly available when the thirst hits you, I mean?"

A chuckle rumbled in my chest. "Quiet, I had no idea you were so possessive."

Her lips turned down into a pout. "Neither did I . . . Don't bite anyone else."

The rumble in my chest turned into guffaws. "Bossy woman."

"Please," she amended.

"Eat your stew, bossy woman," I said, repressing a smile.

As I made myself comfortable in the armchair, Quiet sat at her desk, forcefully stirring her stew. She was brooding. I could see the tension in her shoulders and spine, could sense her souring mood even at a distance.

"Jealousy looks very good on you from here, love," I told her.

Her shoulders drooped. She spooned up her food, chewing harshly. "I know you're not answering me directly on purpose. I know you're goading me," she said with her mouth full.

I smirked at the back of her head. "I don't know what you mean," I lied.

Quiet dropped her spoon in the most gratifying way. It plopped into the bowl. She spun in her chair to face me. "Blast it, Rorick. You'd better not need a snack and go biting anyone else. I mean it now. Not even a nibble."

I laughed at the ceiling, a big loud belly laugh. Her returning glower was perfectly petulant.

"There isn't another vein in the whole wide world I'd rather have than yours," I said between bouts of a mirth I couldn't contain. "No one compares. I'm not going to bite anyone else."

She considered me for a moment, crossing one leg over the other, eyes dragging down my person before she finally seemed satisfied. "Good."

While she ate, she told me about an experiment she'd started involving ants and their magical network of communication. Then she explained about the surge of foundlings in the home her coven kept. The new littles had the witch volunteers spread thin.

I updated her on the robbery case I'd been working on without her. I'd found gold-hued blood at the crime scene, blood others had mistaken as paint, which is how I was able to determine that the robbers were ichors—a class of undead shapeshifters—and not the local baker who'd originally been identified by the victims. Inspector Sheridan had summoned me to consult, baffled because that same baker had been seen by numerous clients working his usual shift at the time of the theft.

"I used the patches you made for me," I told her. "The ones that change color in the presence of magical blood. Inspector Sheridan is very impressed with them."

"Hm," she hummed contentedly as she dined. "Isn't it strange for ichors to behave in such a sophisticated manner? I'm having trouble picturing the crazed sort I've seen in graveyards banding together to rob anything."

"Happens more than we realize, I think. They're excellent mimics, perfect at blending in. For all we know, the shambling sort we see are a rarer type, like a lesser form."

"Or a ruse," she added, speaking aloud a similar thought I'd been pondering since I closed my investigation after pointing the police in the right direction. "Witches employ similar tactics on occasion. Most of our wands are quite harmless, but we let everyone else think they're always capable of powerful, deadly magic. And traveling in threes has no real effect on anything, but we let others in the world think three witches are more powerful somehow."

It warmed my heart when she shared witch secrets with me. Her trust was a gift I'd never tire of.

When the conversation lagged into a tense silence, I wondered if she was dwelling on the very thing we'd agreed not to discuss. The circus. The specters. The stalemate. Whatever her thoughts, she held to our truce, not voicing a single concern, even as her worries changed her expression, made her brow pucker, and filled her glances with dread.

I enjoyed tucking Quiet into bed when I could. She always became extra talkative right after her head hit the pillow, like the input of the day had to come out of her before she could finally close her eyes.

Pillows had a very different effect on me, but I hadn't been awake very long at that point. Lying at her side, I enjoyed the onslaught of information: worries, feelings, itinerary, guesses about the future. She presented it all so differently lying in the dark, blankets up under her chin, the curtains drawn. Her usual analytical nature softened until it was nearly imperceptible.

The more she said, the more her body curled into mine. The more her voice went thick and dreamy.

"And I need a new toothbrush. I keep forgetting." She yawned widely. "Gilbert got hungry and nibbled some of the bristles off the one I keep here . . . And Rorick?"

"Hm?" I said at her back, filling my nose with the wildflower scent of her hair.

"I'd really rather you didn't bite anyone else if it can be helped," she said softly.

I kissed her cheek, amused. "Wouldn't dream of it, love. Go to sleep."

She was snoring gently moments later.